In this 3MA podcast episode, Soren interviews Henrik (Doomdark) Fåhraeus, who is a Game Director at Paradox Development Studio, creator of Crusader Kings and has worked on game series such as Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Also sitting in on the interview is Jon Shafer, lead designer of Civilization 5 and currently at work on his independent strategy game At the Gates. They discuss whether the Civilization and Europa Universalis games live in alternate dimension, whether provinces are better than hexes, and why it's bad to have too many sons.

I’m Tobias Bodlund, Scripter on the Crusader Kings II team, and I’d like to wish you all welcome to the Way of Life dev diary.

With this being a rather small expansion compared to most and release being less than one week away now, we will only have this one dev diary for Way of Life. So sit back and enjoy!

The scope for this expansion is not about opening a new period in history or new areas to conquer - rather, it’s about going deeper into the characters’ personal pursuits and how they navigate (or manipulate) relationships with other characters.

When designing this expansion, we also wanted to allow the players to choose to some degree what direction their characters will take on a personal level, without therefore locking them into a certain area of the game.

The way we decided to do this is through a new concept called Focus. Focuses are the core concept of the Way of Life expansion. When you start your game, you will be able to choose a focus for your character, and this focus will affect the availability and frequency of certain types of events associated with that focus, as well as unlock certain decisions and actions that you can perform towards other characters.
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Hello and Welcome to the last Dev Diary before the launch of Crusader Kings 2: Charlemagne, my name is Johan Lerström and I am the project lead on the team.

Launch is fast approaching and we are very busy making the last changes and bugfixes before the release, but Im going to take a couple minutes to tell you a story of how half the map is now very different to play.

We've always felt that large parts of the map, even in later start dates is poorly represented by our feudal system, while some parts of the map like the Muslims and Byzantium have gotten some extra features to represent how they differ from feudal Europe, the pagan areas have not gotten quite as much attention.
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I'm Tobias Bodlund, Scripter on the Crusader Kings II team, and I bid you all welcome to this week's dev diary for Crusader kings II: Charlemagne.
Autumn is coming in Sweden but the birds are still singing, though sometimes out of tune.
Today we'll be discussing some new changes that affect how you rule your realm. Some of these things are obviously patch content, while some are locked to having the Charlemagne expansion.
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* CKII: Charlemagne Developer Diaries will be released weekly on Wednesdays from now on up to release! *

Welcome to the Charlemagne dev diaries - and above all, welcome to the 8th century!

I'm Tobias Bodlund, scripter on the Crusader Kings II team, and in this first installment of the dev diaries for CKII: Charlemagne I will be talking about the new 769 start date and how we've chosen to represent that historical period in the game.

We've added a bunch of new cultures to the game. A few of these could arguably have been present in The Old Gods already, but going back to 769 we felt we really needed to shake up the map to properly represent the changing cultural landscape of the Early Middle Ages.
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The long-awaited moment has arrived! Rajas of India is now available on Steam - time to throw yourself into the South Asian power game!

Crusader Kings II: Rajas of India lets you play as a Hindu, Buddhist or Jain ruler in India, taking part in the classic game of medieval politics and intrigue in an entirely new setting. Build an empire with your war elephants, speak to wise gurus, encounter strange yogis, worship Hindu gods, seek purity as a Jain or reap the rewards of Buddhist learning - South Asia is your playground and only history may judge you.

We've also released the 2.1.1 patch for Crusader Kings II, including a huge number of free fixes and improvements for the game. You can view the patchnotes HERE.
The checksum for 2.1.1 is CFYM.
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So we are on our final sprint and soon our work is going to be released. So we thought as per usual it would be nice to wrap everything up with an Ask us anything about the expansion and our collected patch notes that come with this expansion for everyone and not only the adopters of Rajas of India. This is a huge one so click the show spoiler button to enjoy!

MAJOR
- Major map revisions and additions: East Africa, Armenia, Central Asia, Siberia and India
- Added Steam matchmaking support
- Added Steam workshop support
- Added diplomatic range, blocking diplomacy and councillor actions vs too distant characters
- Factions will now revolt as a single unified realm under a temporary title
- Added attrition for units that have been "out-of-supply" for too long (can't live off the land in neutral counties, etc)
- Added support to change window mode setting: fullscreen, borderless or windowed
- New unit type system allowing for more flexible unit types, including War Elephants, Camel Warriors and Horse Archers
- Blocked "North Korea Mode"; you now lose huge parts of all income and levies if your demesne is too big
- Save games are now compressed by default (can be toggled on and off)
- Major memory and performance optimizations

MINOR
- Added opinion malus for holding a character in prison.
- Added opinion malus for former lovers.
- Characters can now have up to five lovers at the same time.
- Tweaks and improvements to many events and decisions.
- Scripted civil wars in history files should now work properly. When scripting civil wars, defender must always be added before attacker for them to work properly.
- Now possible to revoke honorary titles. Revoking an honorary title with a positive opinion modifier will anger the previous holder.
- Added support for multiple lovers.
- Impregnation of lovers is now handled in the code.
- Updated all events to use the new scripting logic for friends, rivals and lovers.
- Characters will no longer get 'Marriage Ties' opinion bonus towards their spouse.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing vassals from being able to be called into war under certain CBs that were scripted to allow it.
- CBs that call other vassals into a revolt will now automatically call all vassals when war is declared.
- Sons asking for titles can now start an adventure for one of your titles if refused. Especially common among Muslims. (event 37000)
- Timur and Seljuk now arrive in a more involved fashion and need to survive before they launch their great gambit
- Children can no longer pick up the religion or culture of a guardian if the guardian does not share the religion or culture of his employer
- The Nestorians are no longer a heresy, and have their own holy order (The Order of St Addai)
- Added the Messalian heresy (Nestorian)
- Made the Paulician heresy (Orthodox)
- You can no longer usurp the sole primary title off of someone with a different religion if he has any holdings within it
- You no longer get an opinion bonus from your vassals for defending against rebels, adventurers and the like
- You can no longer call allies to help you defend against peasant, heretic and religious rebels
- Added a decision to conscript merchant ships if playing a ruler with overseas holdings
- Reduced piety gained from battles
- Increased piety cost of Muslim Invasion CB
- Whether a character is too insignificant for anyone to care if you execute them is now determined by whether they have any titles, claims, or titled close relatives
- Children, incapable characters and prisoners can no longer join factions
- The decision to acknowledge bastards as your own now works again
- Becoming infirm will now abort self improval ambitions
- Characters now lose the ambition to get married upon becoming eunuchs or homosexual
- Cathar women can now have the same career ambitions as men
- Can no longer reform the Orthodox religion, instead one has the Decision to restore the Ecumenical Patriarchate
- Events can no longer make tech points negative
- Fixed a rare crash related to loading savegames with events referring invalid characters
- Cathar vassals no longer have negative opinions for liege or liege's heir being female
- Expelling holy orders now blocks further Decisions towards them
- Holy Orders can no longer ask for the right to build castles in the lands of vassals of someone who has expelled them
- If a Holy Order is your vassal when you expel it, it will be set free
- Added missing decision to expel the Bektashi Order
- No longer possible to hire holy orders that you've expelled
- Reduced the number of standing troops of the Knights of Calatrava and Santiago
- After a successful decadence revolt, the new ruler only gets weak unpressed claims on vassals who choose independence
- Increased chances that vassals will choose independence after successful decadence revolts
- Doubled the Prestige that newborn characters get from their dynasty at birth
- Doubled the Prestige you get from the dynasty of your spouse when marrying
- Added missing de jure capitals to the Kingdom of Anatolia and the Duchies of Spoleto and Latium
- Added a prisoner age check to event 50010
- Added updated flags for titles within the Arabian, Mali and Byzantine de jure empires
- Fixed a couple of location triggers in Christian monastery events.
- Fixed bug in bookmarks reading of files
- Fixed duchies names not showing properly in de-jure duchy map mode
- Added Camel Warriors retinue type to Arabic culture
- Fixed crash bug when units die of attrition
- Tweaked max attrition just so slightly
- Improved the Sons of Abraham version of the heresy appearance event (SoA.4000)
- Strengthened adventurers in general
- The king of Jerusalem is no longer allowed to vassalize the Knights Templar or the Knights of St John if they are too powerful already
- Tweaked the cultural conversion events a bit, mainly to improve the special Mongol conversion factor
- Corrected the terrain in many provinces
- Fixed a bug where saves where primary title was dynamic didn't have CoA
- Fixed a bug that if the primary title was dynamic the character was not auto selected after loading
- Fixed a bug where kicking someone out of the lobby would make that character unselectable
- Fixed a bug where selecting a player in the outliner would sometimes navigate to an incorrect province
- Fixed a bug where map borders were not correctly loaded when going into multiplayer
- Fixed a bug where map names were not correctly loaded when going into multiplayer
- Cash, Prestige, and piety commands can now be used with values smaller than 1
- Text field cursor position fixed in multiple cases
- Fixed a bug where children would lose their guardian upon reload
- Fixed a bug where only a single opposite trait would be removed
- Famagusta is no longer an Abbasid vassal in 867
- Loot bar regrows more slowly now
- Fixed an issue where event flags would sometimes not clear properly after tournaments, feasts and similar events
- Fixed the triggers for a number of minor events where people could get the event even if they didn't have the correct religion
- Fixed broken trigger for the Decadent Warrior achievement
- Cut "succession wars" and all (mostly obsolete) mechanics to do with vassal revolt risk
- Jews can now also hire the Abyssinian and Nubian mercs
- Fixed a nasty bug where whole Patrician families could be genocided on succession
- Added events for the rise of the Ghaznavids
- Added a negative opinion modifier for vassal kings vs their emperor liege
- Improved or fixed religion triggers in many events
- Improved localization for a number of older events
- Minor tweaks to effects for many events
- Added a special decision to form the HRE
- Events are now saved and loaded from saves
- Compressed saves are now saved with meta data to improve performance
- Localisation of other languages now defaults to English
- Flags now appear and disappear when you're the correct height above the ground
- Saving the game with a dynamic title now saves the correct COA and automatically reselects the character you played upon loading
- Some minor changes to the save games format to improve backward compatibility
- Save games list now show if the save is unsupported
- Added equal-opportunity tumbling of courtiers for women and homosexuals.

INTERFACE
- Family view now uses a larger siblings box if character's religion does not allow secondary spouses or concubines.
- The "Threats" tab in the Intrigue View is now filled with appropriate characters
- Added an "Adventurer Threat" alert (replacing the old "Angry Vassal" one)
- When choosing educate character for a child, a suitable guardian will now be pre-picked (for the cases where you don't want to bother to pick one yourself).
- Added a new tab to dynastic view that shows friends, rivals, in-laws and lovers.
- Religion/Culture filter in character finder now actually filters by religion/culture instead of religon/culture group.
- Pressing the skull icon will now navigate to the killer (if he is known)
- Court tab now shows councillors as well
- Improved a lot of title and culture colors
- Added opinion modifiers to the trait tooltip
- Fixed tooltips for trigger 'has_guardian' and 'has_regent'
- Corrected the tooltip for the trigger 'any_claim'
- Pressing on red character skulls now navigates to the murderer
- Character view now shows the correct piety icon for the selected character
- Expel Jormsvikings was missing localisation

AI
- Much less likely to plot against characters they have a high opinion of.
- Much less likely to form factions against characters they have a high opinion of.
- Improved guardian selection logic.
- More prio on converting demesne provinces over vassal provinces.
- Less willing to marry young male characters to older women.
- Will now detach and move away if their parent stack is suffering severe attrition.
- Will now keep attrition-free event troops mostly consolidated instead of spreading them out.
- Now takes terrain and unit quality into account when determining whether to run away from enemies.
- Smarter about when to assault if there are enemy troops nearby.
- Better at determining who to attach to in war.
- Better at coordinating with allies in war.
- Will no longer declare suicidal faction independence wars that only have a fraction of their liege's power.
- Now smarter about when to hire mercenaries in a war.
- Less willing to fold to independence, pretender and antiking factions.
- Will now never fold to a very weak faction.
- Will stop more plots.
- The Hordes will now be more prone to head in the "right" direction.
- Will now execute dynasty decisions.
- Smarter about title revocation.
- Will not start claimant factions for old women, or a parent of the current ruler.
- Muslim characters are more likely to pick up the 'Gain a Title' ambition.
- Foreign rulers are now generally quite willing to take on wards as hostages

MODDING
- Added support for multiple lovers.
- Can now block minor titles from being revokable.
- The faction power level at which you get a warning alert is now scriptable.
- Now possible to script vassal_opinion, liege_opinion and sex_appeal_opinion into modifiers.
- Now possible to mod whether character interactions require a character to have their cost in prestige/piety on hand to use the interaction.
- Now possible to mod out character interactions entirely through defines.
- Added new define NOT_SPOUSE_FERTILITY_MULT that governs impregnation chance between non-married lovers.
- Added new define MARRIED_LOVERS_FERTILITY_MULT that governs impregnation chance between married lovers.
- Added triggers num_of_lovers, num_of_spouses, num_of_consorts, is_lover.
- Added scopes random_consort, random_lover, any_lover.
- Friends and rivals can now be added and removed with add_friend, add_rival, remove_friend and remove_rival.
- is_friend and is_rival now check correctly against rival/friend rather than high/low opinion.
- pacifist in religion groups is now called ai_peaceful.
- pacifist=yes in religions now denotes religions with decreased aggression and stable realms. Only works on Jain religion if player does not own Rajas of India.
- pacifist=yes in script now checks if character belongs to a pacifist religion.
- Can now script AI conversion behaviour for religions & religion groups.
- Added MAX_JOINED_FACTIONS to defines, sets how factions a character can be a part of (including led ones).
- Added scriptable static modifiers for characters of different ages(0-15, 16-19, 20-29, 30-49, 50-69 and 70+).
- Added allow_join to factions, this restricts whether characters can join factions.
- Added peace_piety_gain for religions
- Added designated heir functionality
- Added flag 'feminist = yes' to religion scripts (defines that a religion is not prejudiced against female rulers).
- Added trigger 'is_lowborn'
- Added trigger 'num_of_dynasty_members'
- Added the ability to change the name of piety for religions.
- Added real_tier, lower_real_tier_than, higher_real_tier_than triggers. These work like a regular tier check except that they ignore temporary titles.
- Added peace_piety_gain for religions
- Added designated heir functionality
- Mercenaries have now been moved to their own script file
- Implemented scriptable troop types.
- Fixed portage crash bug.
- Support for ocean to ocean rivers.
- Added a 'character_modifier' to religions
- Added a 'character_modifier' to cultures
- Fixed feminist flag that can be used in religions to make em not care if ruler/heir is female.
- Added character_modifier for religions
- Can now define ranges of sea zones to make life easier.
- Can now define seperate oceans to help the pathfinding.
- Added trigger 'has_overseas_holdings'
- Added 'Player' text promotion
- Added trigger 'is_within_diplo_range'
- Added 'de_jure_counties' console command (shows a map mode)
- Added a 'manifest_destiny_invasion' CB for various special cases
- Fixed some issues with marriage texts, the 'on_marriage' action and modding
- Added effect 'copy_random_personality_trait'
- Added 'reincarnated' trigger
- Added effect 'set_reincarnation'
- Added event target 'reincarnation'
- History action 'add_matrilineal_spouse' now has been fixed
- Added error logs for incorrectly scripted birth and death dates
- Added handling and error logs of incorrectly scripted mothers and fathers (fixes certain crashes)
- Added 'secondary_event_pictures' to religions and culture
- Added trigger 'can_copy_personality_trait_from'

CONVERTER
- Color table for converter is now in 0-255 range instead of 0-1
- Color table for converter can now script per CK2 title tag as well
- Key provinces of Europe is now scriptable
- Border provinces of Europe is now scriptable

And now you may ask your questions and we will do our very best to answer as many as possible!
Feel free to ask about the expansion, the patch changes or just CK2 in general.

Last week I talked about some of the free features we're putting into the upcoming patch 2.1 (i.e. the free parts of the Rajas of India expansion.) This time, I thought I'd round that off, and next week we will finish this cycle of dev diaries with a Q&A thread!

Why not start off by talking about the promised revised decadence system that people have been clamoring for since, well, the release of Sword of Islam? Admittedly, there were many issues with Decadence; for example, the fact that all unlanded men of your dynasty generated decadence regardless of their virtue, which is strange and unrealistic. Gameplay where you automatically tend to imprison your relatives if you cannot give them land is also a repetitive and, again, not very realistic. So the system needed revision, and now was the time to do it. With the new system, only characters with the new Decadent trait actually give decadence to your dynasty. Landed characters are less likely to pick up the trait, as are Zealous, Diligent and Just characters, etc. The net effect is that decadent characters are rarer but have a greater effect than before. To make it more interesting, we've removed the free imprisoning of dynasty members for Muslims. Instead, you get a chance to convince Decadent characters to straighten up. The outcome depends on your own attributes and those of the target character. If you're diplomatic, for example, he might be easier to convince. If you're learned, you might get him to go on the Hajj, which will automatically remove the Decadent trait, and so on. If you fail, you do get a reason (i.e. no opinion penalty with vassals) to imprison the character, as a last resort.
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Once more Tuesday is upon us and it is time to unleash some more facts about Rajas of India upon your unsuspecting minds. This time, I thought I'd go through some of the major features we're adding in the free part of the expansion, i.e. patch 2.1.

First up, I think you might be interested in the parts of the new map that are actually outside India; the regions of Afghanistan, Transoxiana and Siberia. Part of my reason for wanting to extend the map to the east was to get these areas into the game. If you consider the old edge of the map, you might have noticed that many counties are truncated, or in the wrong place. Places like Balkh and Samarkand were deemed important enough to be on the old map even though they are in reality located off the eastern edge. This is perhaps most obvious around the Urals, where we even have an "Omsk" province. With the new map, these provinces could finally be put in the right place.
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Hello everyone! So finally we address the Elephant in the room, specifically the War Elephant in the upcoming Crusader Kings II: Rajas of India expansion.

When making an expansion based on India we simply couldn't ignore the elephantry that they fielded. These giants will help your Indian rulers to conquer and stampede over any opposition you face, being the heaviest cavalry you can field in Crusader Kings 2. These beasts of war will be mostly available from retinues but there will also be cultural buildings that will produce them for you. They will only exist in very limited numbers compared to other troop types but will have a devastating effect on the battlefield during the melee phase. The Indian general that makes sure to use his unique set of tactics available for these units will without a doubt be victorious.
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I'm Tobias Bodlund, also known as The Witch-King on the forums. I work as a scripter on the Crusader Kings II team and I will be giving you this weeks' dev diary!

Today we're going to talk about events. You will find that not only do many interesting things happen in India - they are also often different to the things that happen in Europe and the Middle East. When expanding the game east into Asia, one of the things we wanted to do was to properly give that feeling of being on a new continent, in a different part of the world. New lands, new events - not in Kansas anymore (more close to Karnataka, in fact).
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New week, new dev diary! This time, I am going to talk of the new religions and their intricacies. As I mentioned last week, there is now a new Indian religion group with three religions; Hindu, Buddhist and Jain. What you get when you buy Rajas of India is the ability to play as a ruler of one of these religions, with all the associated mechanics.

The general idea with all three Indian religions is that they are pluralistic and tolerant, especially toward each other.
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Folks, the Bengal tiger has been out of the bag for a week now, so I think it's time for the first dev diary on Crusader Kings II: Rajas of India! In this first entry, I will just give you a quick overview of what this new expansion to Crusader Kings II is and what it is not. In the weeks to come, I will cover each feature in detail.

First of all, why India? Well, it's always been a long-term goal of mine, and we have gone through the obvious stuff by now. The old eastern edge of the map is suboptimal, both politically and geographically. Many powerful states that interacted with Europe are cut in half, not to mention that the southeastern corner of the map is unhistorically dull. In general, adding India will make the whole Middle East more interesting to play. Most importantly though, India is such a dynamic and fascinating region!
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PDS is happy to present:
My name is: Alexander Ivannikov
My forum nick is: Alexivan
At Paradox development studio I work as: Programmer.
So what do I do, really – what does that mean? Half my time I fix bugs other programmers have made, the other half I introduce more bugs into the system.
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PDS is happy to present:
My name is: Tobias Bodlund
My forum nick is: The Witch-King
At Paradox development studio I work as: Scripter.
So what do I do, really – what does that mean? I design, script and write content for the game, and I also do a lot of historical research.
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Well folks, Yuletide is almost upon us and the expansion Sons of Abraham has now been out for a few weeks. It is, in other words, a good time for some general - and possibly disorganized - "post mortem" thoughts.

Sons of Abraham is a special expansion because it's the first of the "phase 2" cycle of expansions for Crusader Kings II, and it was also mostly made by a new team who approached the game with new eyes and fresh ideas (the old team having moved on to another project.) The irrepressible Groogy (Henrik Hansson) championed the College of Cardinals and made it great, and Tobias "The Witch-King" Bodlund wrote most of the new events and the pilgrimages. Martin "Wiz" Anward took a crack at the AI and Alexander Ivannikov fixed bugs and started improving the network code. I couldn't quite keep my hands off though, so I snuck some crazy stuff in myself (something about evil babies...)
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Friends of moving pictures and audio, there's a new video developer diary for you to take a look at! This time, Henrik Doomdark Fåhraeus talks about the new religious mechanics for the Jewish and Muslim faiths.